moist-making and grin-producing...we-would-genuinely-consider-intercourse-with-these-headphones scale....Fo' shizzle...clarity was mesmerising....experiencing these headphones is akin to having your head oiled and massaged by Mother Nature herself.....Teflon-insulated oxygen-free cabling.....mouth-wateringly gorgeous and stunning

Honest to god, I can't tell real audiophile reviews from the parodies anymore:-(

I'm not convinced there's a point anyway. With headphones, you get so much difference in sound just from how little or how much the foam pads are compressed that I can't imagine anyone being able to use the word "accurate" when talking about headphones unless it is tongue-in-cheek. For accuracy, nothing beats a well-designed listening room with good speakers. Headphones are fundamentally "ballpark" at best.

I'm not a headphone nut, as long as they fit comfortably and I can actually hear stuff through them I'm happy with them - I miss my old $20 no-name headphones, they were comfortable and had a volume dial, unlike these irritating $70 sennheiser ones. Luckily, I didn't technically pay for them as they were bought with a gift card.

Aaanyway, while not big on headphones I do use voice chat a lot, but my headsets never last very long. I got a sennheiser headset for christmas - the sound was great, the micropho

I'm not convinced there's a point anyway. With headphones, you get so much difference in sound just from how little or how much the foam pads are compressed

Well.. No. No you don't. That's the thing -- one of the many differences between $5 headphones and $500 headphones.

I work with audio all the time (it's my job - I invent audio algorithms for broadcast, and related things), and I'm very happy with my HD650s. They were worth every dollar! However, if I get a chance to test the HD800s without having to buy them first, I certainly will.:)

Algorithms for compressing audio and/or encoding it for transmission? You have to test them for quality before you can even think about using them for broadcast...

Ah, I'm not trying to offend you directly here, but I AM curious as to who's really thinking about it and what their standards are?

Radio certainly doesn't give a shit about the compression or "exciter" limits they may add to ensure maximum volume/output for their 150,000 watts of broadcast. As long as they're louder than the next station on the dial, who cares.

The music industry as a whole (90% of recordings) doesn't give a shit about quality, as their levels of mastering and "exciting" are all turned up t

You mention how much the compression of the foam pads makes the sound sooo different that you can't call headphones "accurate" yet speakers in a room some how end up more accurate? The number of speakers, the size of the room, the material of the room, the position of the speakers, the positioning of yourself and so many other factors arguably make the room and speakers far less accurate than headphones.

And just what do you mean by "accurate"? For the sake of argument lets say accuracy is sounding as close to real life as possible. So we have our hypothetical concert with ourselves seated in the 2nd row. We can get a dummy and shove two microphones into his dummy ears for recording the sound. Do you think a 2/4/8 speaker setup would be more "accurate" than headphones? The headphones are practically stream audio directly into the ears.

Consider the professionals. What do you think all those stage technicians, sound engineers, etc. etc. use when dealing with audio? That's right, headphones.

Maybe... maybe we're not dealing with music. Maybe you just want "accurate" sound reproduction and ignore things like audio positioning, head transfer functions and the likes. Take for example an explosion. Then I guess the headphones loose out to the sub woofer.

And I also bring up the car metaphor. Headphones are the motorcycles of the audio world. Sure the top end cars are faster/better but motorcycles are so much cheaper. Buying a $1500 pair of headphones is a lot more accessible than buying a well designed room with speakers.

So we have our hypothetical concert with ourselves seated in the 2nd row. We can get a dummy and shove two microphones into his dummy ears for recording the sound. Do you think a 2/4/8 speaker setup would be more "accurate" than headphones?

Do you already know that what you're describing is "binaural recording" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_recording [wikipedia.org]. When you listen to them with headphones, you get amazing position-awareness of the sounds. Some early binaural recordings were of story dramatazations - and you could hear the door creaking open "behind you".

Take for example an explosion. Then I guess the headphones loose out to the sub woofer.You bring up an interesting idea... using headphones along with a subwoofer to get get the superior sound of headphones and the "feel" of the low-end.

They'll generally also listen on crap speakers to hear what it'll actually sound like for the average listener. It used to be Yamaha NS-10s which are crap in exactly the right way to figure out a lot of mix translation problems.
Bottom line: a well-designed, well-treated room with flat speakers sounds reasonably to very accurate with good translation to most listening situations (from home use to club listening with extended bass response). Phones are great for isolation and accuracy especially when your

Headphones can send sound to the exact location needed while speakers are "ballparking" where the listener will be.

Wow, way off. Mod you down.

You can adjust a monitor's angle relative to a listener's ear canal to a much higher degree of accuracy than you can with headphones. If your headphone speakers are 10 mm away from your ear (a generous assumption), an accidental 1 mm movement in your cans is equal to 15 cm of movement relative to a set of monitors 1.5 meters away. Headpho

Therefore it is important to have a good baseline to mix your music on, the perferable baseline being listening to the music through a good pair of headphones.

In the bigger studios (in the UK at least) it's smallish sized monitors that provide the "baseline", as they are more accurate than tiny headphone speakers and tend to colour the sound far less than really big speakers (too much compression if I recall correctly).

There's a point [headphone.com] well past the $100 mark - the question is is it worth the money, which depends on how much money you happen to have sitting around doing nothing as well as the relative objective quality of the product.

That said I'm not buying anything more expensive than the HD555 in the foreseeable future. In fact with digital room correction techniques I might not be spending anywhere near that much on headphones again, ever.

Also headphones are not just for the sound, they have to feel comfortable too

I'm not an audiophile, but if you can't tell the difference between the 202s and 555s+ you definitely aren't one either. I own the 595s and the 202s and there is a huge difference. The 202s are good, but not "good enough" for people who want something better. And no, those people aren't necessarily snobs.

Can you recommend a good pair of headphones that have a 1/4" input jack as shown on the HD800? Preferably something under $120. I checked and it looks like from the pics on amazon the input cable is permanently attached to the headphones. I'm sure the cable detaching from the headphones isn't a big issue on higher end 'phones but that's been the mode of failure for my last 4 sets of $30+ headphones over the last five years or so.

I've never actually seen them, but from what I've heard they use some rare connector [head-fi.org] that can be purchased individually, but for a crazy price. And more annoyingly, its a different connector as used on the other Sennheisers.

Well that's worthless. In the photo essay (photo#8) they show that there's clearly enough space for a standard 1/4" phono plug jack. Is there some sort of (audio quality) reason why they went with a proprietary connection rather than the 100-year standard phono plug which works with literally everything in existence?I just want something I can plug a standard speaker cable from my HT-5H guitar amp's headphone jack to my headphones directly. I might just hack my own solution this is ridiculous.

I was upset when these came out, my HD-650s [sennheiserusa.com] aren't top of the line anymore.. That said, man are the 800s ugly.

My SR-80s [gradolabs.com] are very good headphones for the money (~$100) and rival the HD650s. One of these day's I'm going to listen to a set of RS2is [gradolabs.com], one of their upper-mid level headphones.

I was trying to decide between the HD-555s and 595s about two years ago. I went with the 595s, and I'm confident I made the right decision (for myself). At the time, I had only the reviews for the two, with a pretty consistent conclusion: the two are very similar. Pretty much same comfort level, and maybe 10% better sound. For double the price.

So why were the 595s the correct decision for me? Because I use my headphones for about 4 hours a work day, 50 weeks a year. At 1000 listening hours a year, I expect

Honest to god, I can't tell real audiophile reviews from the parodies anymore:-(

I bet you're reading it on a cheap LCD display that discards all the engrams in the article so it is impossible to spot parody, irony or sarcasm. If you really want to be able to appreciate this sort of thing you need to read the page on a real man's display [engadget.com]

it's just that Sennheiser includes those quality control steps that the Chinese factories skimp on. They also take more than 0.85 seconds to solder the wires, and they use solder of reasonable quality.

And no, that's not because I collect them, it's because the damned connections keep failing, on everything from 212-pros up through a set of 595s.

I'm not ready to call Sennheiser reliable, even if they are more reliable than a lot of the low-end competition. Headphones could be a LOT more reliable if someone would take some damned time to find a more reliable way to deliver signal than a tiny wiggly wire and a bit of rigid solder.

I noticed these have a 1/4" input jack. I'm in the same boat as you, far too many of my headphones have failed where the cord meets the 'phones. Of course if you're spending more than $100 on headphones and they break more than likely a) they're still under warranty and if not b) any competent TV repair shop should be able to fix the headphones for $20 in less than half an hour. I'm gonna keep browsing this thread, hoping someone posts a link to an affordable brand of decent headphones that has a 1/4" input

One of the best sub-100$ headphones are the Grado SR80s and the SR125s. The 125s are slightly over your budget, but if you don't mind spending a little extra, they are well worth it. The SR80s might not cut it for you since they feature the 3.5mm jack.

BTW, if you are seriously looking for a good set of cans, browse headphone.org or head-fi.org rather than slashdot;)

I myself had a hard time hoarding 100 cute kittens per year as a sacrifice for the safety of our numerous gadgets from gremlins. 5,000 cute kittens a year is no joke but kudos for them in making sure that unfathomable things would not happen to their customer's headphones.

I would have recommended the Logitech S220s. I bought a set for my nephews for Christmas for $25 CAD. When I saw how small the box was that they came in I thought that they were going to be crap, but they were surprisingly decent for the price and loud enough to annoy the hell out of my sister.

The choice of a sound system depends on many factors and one of the most important factor is how it sounds to your ears. It is rather pointless getting an expensive sound system if your hearing is limited yet many people do just this.

I have a very nice 7.1 sound system which cost me close to AU$2000.00 (equivalent to US$0.9 to A$1 at the time) and I will admit that when I play a Blu-ray movie the sound is impressive for everyone who is listening. Unfortunately when I listen to my son's Logitech Z5500 soun

Indeed, it's strange that the summary says that when the same company makes ones ten times the price. And they come with a shiny silver vacuum tube amplifier (I think that's what they are) that would to me kind of defeat half the purpose of having headphones: portability.

While I could never justify paying $1500 for headphones, I have to say that I've been consistently impressed with the sound quality from Sennheiser 280-HD headphones. I'm sure there are better headphones to be had, but probably not for anywhere near $80.

The 60-80 dollar range seems to be a "sweet spot" for headphones. Grado's SR-60s are $70 and the best headphones under $100 I've listened to. More expensive ones can be better, but you quickly run into diminishing returns.

As with anything, there's diminishing returns. The more you spend on audio, the better the sound gets (well, assuming you are buying real improvements and not snake oil like wires), but by less and less the more you spend.

For example the difference between $10 headphones and no headphones is, well, everything. It is the difference between sound and no sound. Even cheap is better than nothing. The difference between $50 and $10 headphones isn't everything, but it's still pretty large. It's the sort of thing

Honestly I wouldn't have spent $80 on headphones for myself, someone gave them to me as a gift. Should they ever stop working I'll gladly replace them with something of similar quality and price. Climbing down the price/quality bell curve is always a case of diminishing returns, but for something with the quality/comfort/performance/lifespan of 280-HDs, $80 is a reasonable proposition for many.

Not that that it's desirable on it's own, but we're talking about headphones that are so sensitive that I could hea

I remeber a time before package managers, before Ubuntu, before wikis. When it was you, a partially working kernel, all the uncompiled source code you could imagine and an encyclopedias worth of READMEs. Yes, it took me 3 goddamn days to compile the ALSA modules and tools and get them to play nice with my kernel on my P1-133 machine.

If accuracy across the audio range is of primary importance, headphones will always severely pale compared with a set of reference monitors (a.k.a. speakers) due to their physical limitations. The most I've spent on headphones thus far has been around $300 - I've spent around $600-$700 for four different sets of cans - and I've yet to find headphones that aren't severely flawed. Headphones are a second-choice option, albeit one that comes up a lot in every day life.

Is there any reason in particular that headphones cannot accurately reproduce sound?

The only thing I can think of that a headphone would have trouble reproducing, is a deep, loud bass. That's only because it doesn't have the displacement to highly compress low frequency. Monitor speakers suffer the same problem though.

Still, because headphones sit right next to the ear, they're _much_ more efficient at delivering sound waves to the ear. This allows them to deliver sound at a comparable volume, with much

Yes, there is a reason, which is that they would sound terrible if they had a flat frequency response and nobody would buy them.

So, why is that: well, the "natural" way we hear sounds isn't "accurate" in the sense that not all frequency transduce with the same efficiency. The sound is modified by the geometry of your head and ears, also called the "head related transfer function" or HRTF for short. The HRTF is direction-dependent, it is also person-dependent as no two people have exactly the same head. Your auditory system understands your HRTF at a subconscious level and "factors it out" in determining the direction of sound and so on (for example sounds at higher elevation tend to have a bias towards higher frequency content created by the ear pinnae).

Now, headphones include a filter that applies a "simulated HRTF" that places the sound approximately directly "in front" of the listener. If they didn't include this, the sound would be very strange.

The downside to this is that the headphones' HRTF isn't individualized to your own head, and it can't be changed, and its exact specification varies from one model to another quite a lot. Usually the companies don't say exactly how the filter is constructed, and it requires some very fancy equipment (like dummy-heads and so on) to measure the headphone response accurately enough to make an inverse filter. The Sennheisser HD580 is one model (no longer in production) that we have some fairly extensive data for, and that is why it is still the standard for most auditory psychophysics research.

Loudspeakers on the other hand (in particular, reference loudspeakers for mastering) are actually designed to have a flat frequency response. Getting a good listening room isn't easy either, but if you work with a measurement microphone it is possible to check the results pretty easily.

On the subject of bass response, the impedance of air in the ear canal when closed off by the headphone is much much lower than the impedance of the driver in open air, which is why phones can deliver a quite good bass response with a very small driver.

I love my headphones, and I love my speakers, but they are two different beasts, and different moods and styles of music usually dictate my choice of speakers vs headphones, and which speaker or headphone to use.

I have multiple sets of both, and my favorite speakers are a set of Full-range Fostex FE206Es. They are pretty flat [fostexinternational.com], but its more than just the driver that makes a speaker flat.

It might also have to do with the specific amp that I can only use with very efficient speakers. Its amazing how much volum

The reason speakers need multiple drivers is because they have to create the sound waves "into infinity", while the headphones only have to create a wave in a small volume of air between the coils and the earsdrums.

A typical rule of thumb is that frequency reproduction of a headphone is about as good as of a speaker 25 times its price.

If accuracy across the audio range is of primary importance, headphones will always severely pale compared with a set of reference monitors (a.k.a. speakers) due to their physical limitations.

Loudspeakers have to be placed somewhere.. Usually in a room. The acoustics of the room (echo / reverberation / cancellations) will severely impact the sound of speakers, and there's no way around it without spending thousands on deadening and soundproofing the room. Yes, you can RTA and EQ, and get speakers sounding almost as accurate as cans, but it will never be as tight, unless you have a sonically dead room.

A pair of reference cans, on the other hand, interface with your ears much more accurately, and are not at all affected by room acoustics. If they have flat frequency response on one pair of ears, chances are they will have flat frequency response on most other pairs of ears too.

My work requires me to critically listen to music almost constantly (I write audio algorithms / processors for broadcasting). I normally listen to music on calibrated speakers, but when it's time for extra critical listening, my I put my HD650s on. Speakers are no substitute -- they hide too much, smooth over problems. Reference cans give you the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth (whether you want to hear it or not!).

I currently own a pair of HD650s and they were worth every penny at around $500. Electrostatic cans (STAX brand) would be another step up in accuracy, but comes at a hefty price (cost, fragility, special high-voltage amplifier etc). Until I can audition a pair of HD800s for free, I'll stick with what I have.:)

There are many different standards for "accuracy", including "repeatability" and "flat", which are not the same. Headphones are superior to speakers for repeatability, when measured at the ear canal entrance. But they are not "flat" because they include a built-in simulated "free field response" HRTF that modifies the signal (at least, all consumer-market 'phones include this filter), plus some other geometric design issues.

With some work it is possible to get loudspeakers to give a flat response at a fix

The idea of a flat frequency response on a set of cans is laughable. Even a $27,600 pair of ADAM mastering monitors can't provide a flat frequency response, so don't mislead casual readers into thinking that your HD650s are flat -- here is their "flat" frequency response. [headphone.com]

One of the completely ignored problems with headphones (other than ones I'm sure you've heard before) is that physical positioning (distance and angle) of the speakers relative to the user's ear canal makes a big difference in the sound hea

I was fortunate enough to purchase a good set of HD600s and a headphone amp to go with it. I've used them as my primary computer sound system for over a decade now.

I'd describe the Sennheisers as very detailed and precise. I can hear things with them that I have a hard time picking out with my stereo and other cheaper headphones. In addition the soft donut pads make the headphones a joy to wear. I can wear them all day without my ears feeling sore or my head feeling fatigued.

Shameless plug for HeadRoom at www.headphone.com where I purchased my gear. These guys make headphone amps and also spend lots of time testing all sorts of headphones to go with them. They're a wealth of information for anything headphones.

There are some albums that I listen to solely because of their production - like Eric Clapton's Me and Mr. Johnson. None of the songs are that great (compared to some of the other albums he's played on), but the sound that he can get out of a guitar sucks me right in.

It is the Clapton album that sounds the best, and because of it I listen to it at least as much as his others.

It's all just a matter of priorities. Some folks think spending over $10,000 on a car is dumb, others see spending more than $500 on a computer, or more than $50 on a video card is stupid. For anyone who thinks that spending $1,500 on a pair of headphones is crazy, the simple fact is that you're not the intended audience.

I don't necessarily trust what I read from so-called 'audiophiles'. Being an 'audiophile' is a little bit like being a 'photographer'. Just because you took one good picture of your dog doesn't mean you're now an expert on all things photographic. The audiophile world is, IMHO, similar. The only way to *know* what "good" stuff sounds like is to listen to the "good" stuff for yourself. You can read hundreds of reviews that describe 'veiled soundstage', or 'low-oxygen connectors', or 'velvet midrange', etc. But it doesn't mean a whole lot if you can't put it into context. The only way to do it is to listen and decide for yourself!

About a year ago, I decided that I wanted a *good* pair of headphones for my office. I exchanged several emails with the folks at headphone.com about this, and with their blessing I ordered about $1,500 worth of headphones and amps from them, knowing that $1,000+ of it would be returned.

I spent several weeks comparing and contrasting a half-dozen of their 'best' headphones. The result? There is a big difference between $100 cans and $500 cans. Try it for yourself. Some people might not be able to tell the difference. And that's cool, buy the $100 pair and be happy. But just as some people enjoy wine, cars, cigars, cheeses, types of underwear, video cards, {whatever!} more than others is why the market supports so many varieties of, well, everything. And at different price points.

FWIW, I ended up keeping a pair of Sennheiser HD-650's because their sound was simply incredible and they were comfortable for long periods of time.

You personally might be willing to accept distortions of various kinds (we all make our own tradeoffs), but the point in audio design is that the equipment attempts to recreate as faithfully as possible the original sound. The fact that people are willing to accept less than outstanding audio fidelity is analogous to people being willing to eat fast food. Most people being willing to eat fast food doesn't mean that a world-class chef using the finest ingredients doesn't create a fundamentally different gustatory and nutritional experience, or that there aren't people who can discern and appreciate the difference.

In this case, pushing transducer response farther and farther beyond the audible range of hearing improves the linearity of the response within the audible range. The same way that a 192k sampling rate doesn't mean people can hear up to 96kHz, it means that the filter response in the audio band is better, driver response down to 6Hz or up to 50k doesn't mean Sennheiser is suggesting people can hear down or up to those points, but that the response from 20-20k is better.

In the audio work I've done (music recording and film sound), we've worked very hard to achieve the most accurate reproduction possible...because we can hear it.

The best analogy for how that could even be possible is the way one's hearing adapts to quiet. At first, compared to normal environments, a 20dB room seems very quiet, even silent. But spend time in that 20dB room and then move to a 0dB anechoic chamber and that previously quiet 20dB can seem surprisingly noisy. Another visual analogy is the way that some people don't notice compression artifacts in images at first, but see them easily once they know what to look for.

I'm reminded of the early days of HDTV equipment manufacturers trying to convince us (where I was at the time) it was finally possible to use HD for feature film principal photography. Some manufacturer or other had brought in their latest and greatest camera demo reel, where they had shot footage on film and then at some secret point cut over to footage shot on HD. One of the people in the screening room wasn't really a technical person, and quietly asked us (quite reasonably) that if the quality of the images was really so hard to distinguish what they could look for to tell when the images switched from film to HD. Our (only half-joking) answer was "just look for when the film guys start vomiting.":-D

While I completely agree with your sentiments, I doubt your 2inch mids would produce 18-20000Hz with a relatively flat response rate.

I could buy an incredible set of monitors and enough foam for a large room with 1500 that would blow these guys out of the water though. I just dont understand the obsession with headphones, especially when they are going to be pumping 160Kbps AAC out of an iPod.